eBay Poaching Claims Against Amazon

eBay is accusing Amazon of a well-planned, coordinated and worldwide campaign to poach its sellers. The online marketplace has already filled a lawsuit against the Seattle-based firm, claiming that Amazon has used an internal messaging system to lure its sellers. eBay claims that representatives from Amazon signed up for eBay accounts, which they used to send messages to eBay sellers, urging then to sell their goods on Amazon. To eBay, this is a great violation of user agreement and action should be taken against Amazon.

eBay and Amazon are the currently the most popular e-commerce platforms especially now that people are enjoying the convenience of shopping online more.

The lawsuit states that representatives from Amazon asked their targeted eBay sellers to communicate on the phone in order to avoid being detected. This, according to eBay, is a very calculated move by Amazon to illegally poach its sellers.

Before filing for a lawsuit, eBay had first made its complaint public early this month, saying that it had discovered and unlawful and worrying scheme on the part of Amazon to lure eBay sellers to move their business to Amazon’s online marketplace. The company even made demands to Amazon to end it but Amazon at that time only said that it would conduct a deep investigation into the matter.

This is a serious matter considering that both Amazon and eBay rely on independent sellers to make an earning. Poaching sellers from one company would mean a decline in the amount of revenue received in that company that year. A big part of Amazon’s growth has also been attributed to the increasing number of independent sellers using its platform. Last year alone, more than half of the items sold in Amazon were those sold by third party sellers.

eBay now wants Amazon stopped in its use of messaging platforms to poach sellers as well as to pay the San José based online marketplace an unspecified amount of money. There is no word from Amazon yet about the matter but if it is true that the Seattle-based company violated user agreement then it might end up paying dearly for it.